If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.
Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.
When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.
After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an ‘undoing’ is required.
All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt – even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called.
When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.
I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.
Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like.
I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself.
War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.
I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.
Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Law Giver.
The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.
The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.
A sign of a culture that has lost its faith – Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.
Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one.
Because God created the Natural – invented it out of His love and artistry – it demands our reverence.